I'm currently using an old Celeron D for file server duties but as you might guess I'm itching for an upgrade.

I was thinking about picking up one of those dual core Atom D2500 ITX boards but so far I've only seen them with two SATA ports and a single expansion slot which is too few, then I found this ASUS C60M1-I (http://mx.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_CPU_on_Board/C60M1I/#specifications) which has 6 SATA ports but I'm not sure how the C-60 would fare in file server duties. It'll stream music, video and it'll also store BD images which will be mounted over the network. No video transcoding.

Should I be looking for more omhp or would the C-60 suffice?? Maybe a standard mATX board and CPU would be required?

The server is projected to have 12 HDDs and I'll use unRAID, don't know if that would affect the CPU selection.

I took the plunge and ordered the ASUS C60M1-I. Let's see how it rolls.

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As a media or file server it should work pretty dang well TRWOV! My only issue with that system was the fact that it only had D-Sub and DVI. No HDMI out. If a person wanted to use this system for an entertainment HTPC as well as a file server/media server, he or she would have to purchase a video card for HDMI. Aside from that issue it is pretty sweet and a great price as well.

I would avoid the atom. It is quite enough for file-server only duties... but let's say you wanted to run some "services" like PDF, OCR, http-server (even if just for LAN and not open to internet), then you will find the Atom a little disappointing. I run 2x D2700 supermicro 1UE racks, one as a RAID1 fileserver, the other as a web-server exposed to the internet. They both manage fine... but the webserver doesnt do video and has MAX only 20 users (it's a private website). I wanted to run a watchfolder with PDF-shrink-and-OCR service, and also HP Digital Sender Service (pretty similar function... scan, OCR, PDF) but it was so too slow on the Atom, I had to run it on a desktop.

I remember seeing recently on the supermicro website, they have a MOBILE CHIPSET ITX board. It runs idle near-nothing power, but when demand hits, it will significantly outperform the Atom.

Then the Atom is OK in your usage scenario. Think of an Atom as a Pentium 4 Willamette (pre Northwood) on a much lower power envelope. It is, performance wise, nothing more. You will find atom systems dirt cheap on ebay as people who bought them quickly decide to upgrade to more powerful systems.